The Night Cafe

Van Gogh painted The Night Cafe in September 1888 in Arles. He stayed up for three consecutive nights to paint it, sleeping during the day. He was 35 and had been in Arles since February, painting in the fields and streets of the town. The interior of a cafe is shown from a high viewpoint. Five customers sit at tables along the walls, their faces barely indicated. A billiard table fills the center of the room, painted in green with a red surface. The landlord, Ginoux, stands behind the table, his figure a dark silhouette. A half-curtained doorway leads to more private quarters in the background. The walls are painted in a harsh red, the ceiling in yellow-green. The lamps hang from the ceiling, casting circles of light. The canvas is roughly 28 by 36 inches, landscape format. The colors are violent: the red of the walls, the green of the billiard table, the yellow of the lamps. Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo about this painting in detail. He said he had tried to express "the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green." He described the cafe as a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime. The painting is one of the most disturbing interiors in 19th-century art. The cafe was the Cafe de la Gare, at 30 Place Lamartine, run by Joseph-Michel and Marie Ginoux. Van Gogh was staying nearby, at the Yellow House. He painted the cafe in oil, and later made a watercolor copy. The painting was bought by the Yale University Art Gallery in 1961, bequeathed by Stephen Carlton Clark. Oil on canvas, 72.4 by 92.1 centimeters. Van Gogh painted with a harsh, unnatural palette of reds, greens, and yellows, building the room in thick, angled strokes. The perspective is distorted: the billiard table is seen from above, the walls from eye level, the floor from below. The lamps are flat circles of yellow, with no modeling. This painting works in a living room, dining room, or bar. The intense colors and interior scene suit a room with warm lighting, dark walls, or red accents. The 18x24 framed version in a black frame complements the palette. The painting is in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, accession number 12507. This is a public domain artwork, sourced from Wikimedia Commons. We print it on archival matte paper at sizes from 8x10 to 24x36 inches, framed or unframed. The image is printed at full resolution with no cropping.